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Studies European Journal of Women's European Journal of Women's Studies http://ejw.sagepub.com/ 'Living in translation': A conversation with Eva Hoffman Ann Phoenix and Kornelia Slavova European Journal of Women's Studies 2011 18: 339 DOI: 10.1177/1350506811415194 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ejw.sagepub.com/content/18/4/339.citation Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com On behalf of: WISE (The European Women's Studies Association) Additional services and information for European Journal of Women's Studies can be found at: Email Alerts: http://ejw.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://ejw.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav >> Version of Record - Nov 8, 2011 What is This? Downloaded from ejw.sagepub.com at Institute of Education University of London on November 12, 2012 Interview EJWS European Journal of Women’s Studies 18(4) 339 –345 ‘Living in translation’: © The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: A conversation with sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1350506811415194 Eva Hoffman ejw.sagepub.com Ann Phoenix Institute of Education, UK Kornelia Slavova University of Sofia, Bulgaria This special issue on translation is inspired by Eva Hoffman’s memoir Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, which addresses translation on many levels: translation of languages and cultures, translating embodied experience into a textual self, psychother- apy as translation therapy and the ultimate level of ‘self-translation’. It has inspired many publications and reviews as well as giving insights into the experience of language dis- location that were not generally considered in 1989 when the book was published. Dr Eva Hoffman is an internationally renowned writer and academic. Born in Kraków, Poland she emigrated with her family to Canada in 1959. She studied at Rice University, Texas (English literature), the Yale School of Music and Harvard University, where she received a PhD in literature. She was awarded an honorary DLitt by the University of Warwick in 2008 and has been formerly a member of the CUNY Hunter College’s Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing. Her publications include Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language (1989), Exit into History: A Journey Through the New Eastern Europe (1993), Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews (1997), The Secret (2002), After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust (2004), Illuminations (published in the US as Appassionata) and Time (2009). She has taught creative writing at Kingston University and MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Eva Hoffman now lives in London, where the following conversation took place. AP: Having written and published Lost in Translation 20 years ago, what would you say are the issues now for you, in terms of being a woman living in a multilingual country? EH: If I look at it in retrospect, it seems to me that I came to America at a particular point. Of course, one always comes to a place at a particular point but two kinds of things affect- Corresponding author: Ann Phoenix, Institute of Education, Thomas Coram Research Unit, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL, UK. Email: [email protected] Downloaded from ejw.sagepub.com at Institute of Education University of London on November 12, 2012 340 European Journal of Women’s Studies 18(4) ed my experience of immigration and trans-acculturation. First, it was an immigration which took place in a Cold War world. So, the assumption was – and for my parents it turned out to be entirely true – that we could never go back. I was sort of prised out of my childhood and out of Poland. I was a very reluctant immigrant at that point. So the sense of rupture was quite extreme and stark. There was a sense of absolute division, between the past and the present, between my old self and the new self, etc. and synthesizing the two took a very long time. It was a kind of labour to try to put it all together. At the same time, in America of that time, the ideology was still that of a melting pot, and of course it was the immigrants who were supposed to do the melting. So one was supposed to be- come an American. Very quickly. And there was really no sense of, no acknowledgement even or understanding of, cultural difference. People did not think it mattered, they didn’t really believe that culture can form you quite profoundly, and that cultural difference can be very central and deep. Immigrants took various attitudes towards this and various psychological paths, so to speak. In the 1960s some people just went along with it and did try to assimilate and to become American instantly, and, of course America did offer great opportunities to many people, including to me, and I was genuinely grateful for that and remain grateful for it. I think that often there were costs of this kind of camouflage. Because, as you know, this kind of process of cultural transformation cannot happen over night or by sheer will. So I think that many people paid a kind of psychological price for it. This has changed enormously since then, with the emergence of the ideology of multiculturalism: i.e. rec- ognizing cultural difference, recognizing the force of it. I think that today people don’t struggle to be understood on this absolutely basic and fundamental level, that struggle has lessened. Of course, this doesn’t mean that everybody understands other cultures, and what they mean, and how they form you, and how they construct you very deeply. But at least there is some acknowledgement of difference. We have also been through a stage of perhaps romanticizing difference, of over- emphasizing it, and assuming that the Other is somehow wiser than we are, that there is a certain wisdom in otherness. And, I think that clearly has its perils. We’re still not fin- ished with thinking about how to handle multiculturalism and contemporary democratic societies. Thinking still has to be done. However, I do believe that the psychological trajectory of immigration is now very different. AP: That’s a nice phrase, psychological trajectory. EH: Well, because there was a trajectory I think. There are stages. Several decades after my emigration, the world is completely intermingled. Cross-national movement is norma- tive. It’s almost being rooted in completely stable lives – lives lived in one place – that is the exception. So the world has become much more nomadic, much more intermingled. KS: You are not in exile any more? EH: No. KS: In Lost in Translation after your protagonist has come to terms with the English lan- guage and with herself, she says that the condition of exile is the archetypal condition of contemporary lives. Do you think that the term ‘exile’ needs to be revised in this global world? Is nomadism now a more appropriate term? EH: Yes, I think it is. There are different kinds of movement and exile is rare – perhaps exile in its strong sense still exists in some parts of the world, but I actually can’t think of any. KS: Some people see today’s constant movement in negative terms – a kind of rootlessness or motion sickness. Others stress its positive nomadic openness. What about you? How do you see this process? EH: Exile in its strong sense meant that you were expelled and that you couldn’t come back. And, of course, this was the case for the many exiles from Eastern Europe. I can’t think of Downloaded from ejw.sagepub.com at Institute of Education University of London on November 12, 2012 Phoenix and Slavova 341 other parts of the world now where this obtains, so perhaps the age of exile of this kind is over. Of course it’s the age of migration, and sometimes it’s not entirely voluntarily migration. But, for example, for the Polish migrants in London now it’s pretty volun- tary, it’s pretty chosen, it is an economic migration. And I sometimes actually don’t quite understand why they choose it. Because, the conditions here are not easy for them, they’re quite alienated from their surroundings. They don’t mean to become acculturated, so it doesn’t make complete sense to me but that’s another story. So, no, I totally don’t think of myself as an exile. I actually never did. I was an immigrant. I wrote a little essay called ‘Out of exile’ for a writers’ symposium on exile, and I wrote the essay because it seemed to me false at some point to keep thinking of myself, of ourselves, as exiles. AP: It’s an interesting title because what you wrote in Lost in Translation seemed to suggest that you were in exile then. ‘Out of exile’ suggests that for you, the trajectory was a move from feeling yourself an exile to coming out of that feeling. Is that right? EH: Well, that is right. I didn’t think of myself as an exile because I wasn’t, but I did feel exiled, in fact, as opposed to my parents. I felt exiled because I was prised out, it wasn’t my choice really to leave at that point. If we’d have left a few years later I would have understood much better why we were doing it, and why I might have chosen it. So yes, that has been absolutely the route. There is a kind of temptation to feel exiled, for a very long time or for ever.
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